


Songs of Defiance and Departure

by deervsheadlights



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Character Death, Desperation, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Outer Space, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:55:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23965003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deervsheadlights/pseuds/deervsheadlights
Summary: The phoenix-from-the-ashes shtick doesn't work out, this time around.In which Tony's body gives up the fight shortly after he's made it back to Earth.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 22
Kudos: 79





	Songs of Defiance and Departure

**Author's Note:**

> i've had part of this written ever since that one endgame trailer came out. wonder oh wonder, i finally finished it (with actual sweat and tears, although there wasn't any blood).

In the beginning, Tony works.

He was always unable remain still, with inaction feeling alien to his very being. Even now, as the ashen faces of his ghosts lurk in every corner and guilt feeds a bottomless abyss in the pit of his stomach, he can’t bear to let his misery be channeled into something as callous as apathy.

Nebula knows her way around the tech; Tony adapts quickly. They salvage parts from the remains of metal and dust that the battle left scattered on the grounds of Titan, and patch up what little damage the Benatar has taken.

Then, they leave.

The journey back to Earth, Tony realizes, is bound to take longer aboard the Benatar. The technology that made it possible for Thanos’ minions to travel at the speed they did isn’t present here – the ship is in good enough condition, but the distance between the Milky Way Galaxy and this one is immense and possibly even greater than the human mind fully comprehends. 

He tries not to let the fact shake him that, while they’ve set course for planet Earth, the exact circumstances of their arrival are up in the air. Neither of them has an answer to the _when_ question. Or the _if_ question, for that matter.

While Nebula navigates them through the boundless void of the cosmos, Tony occupies himself with other things. There’s no use in trying to identify their exact whereabouts, so he tinkers with his suit, assembles the leftover nanites until a mostly functional helmet remains.

More and more often, he catches himself casting glances outside, watching stars and gas giants as they pass by. The sight elicits a feeling of forlornness in him that’s unlike anything he’s ever felt.

Space is vast and cold, but Tony doesn’t fear it anymore – not in the way he has once dreaded the idea of it, looked upon it in his worst dreams and let it consume him in his most sleepless of nights. The terror that once might’ve choked him is gone, curbed and dwarfed by a reality crueler than anything his mind could’ve envisioned. 

Without any other distractions present, Tony can’t keep thoughts from wandering. Back to Titan. Back to the ship. To Peter, and how his expression went from awed pride to determination when being declared an Avenger. The way he pled for his life as he felt it coming to an end, unable to do anything but shake in fear and agony before he crumbled in Tony’s arms. _I’m sorry,_ he’d said under his last breath, apologizing as if Tony wasn’t the one who’d sworn and failed to protect his life in the first place. 

If his eyes are red when he returns to the cockpit, Nebula doesn’t mention it.

There’s something like unspoken understanding between them. Watching your friends and allies turn to dust while you’re the only ones to remain standing will do that to you, Tony thinks, during a bout of morbid cynicism.

Days pass, then a week. They already have rationed their supplies, but agree to cut down on the portion size when it becomes apparent that none of it will last at this rate. 

Tony tries not to let the decreased caloric intake get to him too much. His body doesn’t care.

He becomes slower. The fatigue settles in his bones like lead, and yet he’s too agitated to sleep at the same time. As the days go by, a never-ending headache comes to life and pounds behind his temples. He’s unsteady on his feet. He walks with a bit of a sway and learns to regret collapsing into his seat when his head ends up spinning with the rapid movement. 

Mealtime comes. Tony knows better than to wolf the food down at once; instead, he picks it apart piece by piece.

When he’s done, Nebula’s share still lies untouched in front of her. She looks up when his confused stare becomes too piercing to ignore. After a few moments of silence in which Tony is left wondering, she pushes her piece of food in his general direction, expression unchanged. “Eat,” she says, in a tone that tolerates no dissent, and turns away.

He waits, expecting something else, but Nebula doesn’t react, doesn’t even spare him a glance. Tony decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and eats.

This happens again, the next day.

And the next.

And the day after that.

Tony always assumed that, whatever she is or isn’t, her organism doesn’t operate like any living being he knows. (He can’t help but wonder, but he knows better than to ask.) It becomes all the more clear to him, watching her seemingly unbothered by the lack of sustenance while his own body withers like a neglected flower as the days pass.

Days. _Days._ The thought is accompanied by an inward scoff aimed at his own inanity. Like time itself, this measurement is a construct that doesn’t hold power over the vast emptiness of space. None of it has real meaning once you step past the boundaries of planet Earth; days, weeks, months. What’s a year when time passes differently depending on where you are in the universe? Time isn’t a constant. 

Time bends.

Time changes. Time is nothing.

“Time is nothing,” Tony tells Nebula, whose head snaps around to look at him from across the room. First, her gaze is narrowed as she evaluates what has been said. She tilts her head a little and considers his state of delirium before she decides the statement is worth responding to. 

“Yes.”

“If I don’t–” His voice is throaty, a result of the two days he has already gone without water. Three hours. _Three hours_ , Tony tells himself, and he’ll get to drink again. It has to be like this, or there won’t be any left at all tomorrow. The tomorrow that doesn’t exist here, because they don’t have a point of reference like planetary rotation as they are, floating on this spaceship that Tony is starting to despise.

Nebula looks at him strangely; more than she usually does, and the liquid dark of her eyes that says everything and nothing at all jolts Tony back to their conversation.

He needs to take precautions. Build failsafes. That’s what he does, what any engineer turned futurist does. Even if he doesn’t make it, he can still be of use. He can pass on the understandings he's come to, mulling over the details of the battle lost and Strange's words for the sake of not going insane while they were trapped on this ship. 

“If I don’t make it, tell them it’s time. It’s always been time. There was never enough of it. I tried everything and it still caught up with me. But they can, they– Strange said there’s a way. This is it. Time. Time’s the way. You just need to figure out the specifics, if I can’t.”

She looks at him for a long second. Then, as she nods, their eye contact is severed abruptly, a ripple in spacetime.

“We will,” she says. Nebula doesn’t say much, but the things she does say, she means. Tony likes that in a person, human or not.

His brain might be conjuring up that next particular detail to comfort him in a situation that leaves little for him to be comforted by, but he thinks he sees a certain remorse in the tight lines of her features. 

Remorse that shouldn’t be hers to feel. She’s done everything in her power. More than he ever expected from someone he shared nothing but trauma with – but then again, that’s what emotion will do to feeling beings. It interweaves them, the scars connecting in the negative. Minus into minus equals plus. Simple math. Tony’s known it since before he can remember.

And while the connection is there, and Tony is grateful for it in the good moments and admits he’d have given up the fight without it long ago in the bad moments, he doesn’t want Nebula getting attached to a dying man. It isn’t fair. But what is?

He’s always believed this line of business would kill him before he’d retire. He even made his peace with it, somewhere down the road. That’s simply the price someone like him pays for redemption.

Not like this, though. Tony – despite all his learnt humility – did, in a way, expect to go out with a bang, at least. He expected to die by Thanos’ hand, then and there. And that, he was ready for; he would’ve gone down fighting, at least.

If anything, he expected a sacrifice. It would’ve meant something, at least. 

That much he had earned, at least. 

He didn’t prepare to see his end dying of thirst, starving, bleeding, galaxies upon galaxies away from home.

Just goes to show he might as well have been wiped out with all the others and it wouldn’t have made a difference, in the grand scheme of things. Except someone once known as The Merchant of Death isn’t deserving of the kind of mercy that comes with simple disintegration, Tony supposes.

Thinking is a waste of his energy reserves, but he could never help it, and he can't now. It’s the one thing he’s always excelled at, _thinking._ His mind has always been his one last resort. Ironic, isn’t it, how the very quality that turned him into Iron Man is now wasting away with every minute that passes and every breath he takes.

And so the circle is complete.

Tony wonders if he’ll die like this; spend his final moments trying to think of a way to make them last after all.

Passing stars blur into streaks of light. Bodies of energy bursting with power the likes of which humanity can only dream of, galaxies away with its sun, the yellow dwarf they hold so dear but is nothing in comparison. He wishes he’d get to see it one more time, feel the heat of it on a warm summer day. He wishes for a lot of things; to take a walk in Central Park. Eat a hotdog. Go ice-skating. Smile. Dump a bucket of water over his own head. Hear DUM-E greet him with an excited beep. Hug Rhodey. Kiss Steve again.

Steve.

Time’s never been on their side. Hell, they call him the Man Out of Time, what else is to be expected? Tony ended up tagging along for the sake of it, and now he's here, out of time for an entirely different reason. Not that he blames his personal failings on Steve now. He’s using up all his remaining energies to stay alive, he doesn’t have the strength to hold grudges anymore. 

They had a chance. Tony likes to think they could’ve made it, even if he can’t really tell wishful thinking and sound reasoning apart anymore. He wants to believe that it’s only the unfavorable circumstances and bad timing that made them crash and burn in the end – not that they were incompatible. No, they matched, perfectly even. They were synchronized, scarily so. Souls attuned to the same frequency. 

So much so that when their ideals didn’t align like they should, it threw them for a loop. Not because they weren’t used to clashing with the force of stars colliding, but because everything became all the more intense and evolved alongside their relationship. Every feeling, good and bad. 

Still, Tony thinks they could’ve reached an equilibrium. It is time that has run them ragged; the one it took for them to admit what was between them, the one it took to build trust only for both of them to tear it down in the end – Tony laid the groundwork with Ultron, and Steve tore down the leftovers in Siberia. 

With tears in his eyes and the residual power in his suit that is nothing more than a helmet, Tony records messages. The last one is for Steve, and he talks and talks until he’s given voice to every last trace of anger and bitterness left within him, and everything that remains is longing for a love lost or maybe never even had. Tony doesn’t know. Tony would just like to be held a final time, and that might be enough to send him on to the next place in relative peace.

And then, a weak imitation of FRIDAY’s voice says, “Power depleted. Shutting down now, Boss.” 

Tony is alone. 

Nebula is rarely in the same part of the ship, withdrawing except during the rare times she brings over another cup of water that Tony longs for so profoundly. There are no more games; those had been a bonding exercise and a distraction first, but at some point devolved into just a waste of energy. 

Nothing can distract him from the miserable condition of his existence anymore. Tony has given up on avoiding to spend time pondering it. Every waking minute is filled with the echoes of thoughts about one of two things: water or salvation. Sometimes, he dreads both. What if he lives? What if he dies? What if it doesn’t make a difference either way?

In any case, Nebula is around less and less so. Like she can’t stand looking at what he’s turned into (broken, hollow, a shell), or can’t bear to be around him in that soon-to-come moment when he’ll crawl off into a dark corner to die, as an animal does. Tony wouldn’t hold that reaction against her, but then again, he doesn’t think that’s it. Not quite. He thinks she’s seen too much to be disturbed by that. He thinks– maybe she needs space to cope, even if she doesn’t show it much. A display of nothing at all can be awfully telling of everything sometimes.

(She makes sure he doesn't witness it, but he finds his body rearranged into a more comfortable position or covered with a blanket whenever he wakes up after nodding off for a while. And the while grows longer every time.) 

Once the recordings are done and over with, Tony doesn’t think much at all. As if his subconscious has kept him up and aware just so he could go through with this one thing he knew he still had to do, and then gave up the fight, finally stopped thrashing like a feral cat.

Tony returns to lay at his usual spot by the window, pressing his cheek against the glass because his head is too heavy on his shoulders. He sees the stars crossing their path even when he closes his eyes, shapes and colors dancing behind his eyelids – until he reminds himself that he can’t, lest he find too much pleasure in resting and risk falling asleep for real. He might not wake again if he does.

_Is that how you want to go out? Is this the last act of defiance of the great Tony Stark?_

Yinsen’s voice is looping inside Tony's mind like a broken recording. A mantra, maybe. A decade has passed, and the words still remain etched into his memory fresh as they were the day he fled the cave, molded into something new, something better through the force of fire, blood and water.

Burning but alive.

Tony swallows, with spit he doesn't have.

"I think it is," his voice that sounds alien to him says to no-one in particular. "I think I did all I could."

Stupidly, Tony thinks she’s an angel when he first sees the blurry shape of a person just floating outside of the ship. He realizes he’s mistaken when his vision clears and there’s a fierce look in her eyes and a tension in her jaw that reminds him – also stupidly – of Steve. 

And then, the woman who introduces herself as Carol Danvers carries them back to Earth with ease and speed both of which make Tony rethink the angel theory as he sits there, strapped to the seat in the cockpit that shakes with the force of their velocity.

Velocity is a constant.

Time isn’t, because Earth comes into view in what could only have been hours. It’s unreal. This blue, blue planet is the most beautiful sight Tony thinks he’s ever had the fortune of laying his eyes on.

But then he stumbles off the ship with Nebula keeping him from keeling over then and there, and he sees Steve running toward them. Correction: Earth is a close second. 

Under the man's feet, the distance separating them doesn’t seem like a constant; with every step, the space between them shrinks exponentially, and Steve goes from being a point of orientation just there by the familiar sight of the compound to a person, real, close and warm.

Steve, insufferable, wonderful, beautiful Steve, looks at him with sorrow and guilt and many other unspeakable things, his eyes wide at the sight of Tony. They're haunted with nightmares of ash and dust, just as Tony knows his own are. Then, Steve gasps in shock as Tony tips over and into his arms, finally, _finally_ being held. 

He shudders, but Steve holds him tight as the world shifts and they suddenly find themselves on the grass beneath. The ground is cool but soft, familiar and unlike everything in the environment of this spaceship that Tony has learned to view as a blessing and a curse all at once. He feels himself tremble and is aware it’s not only a reaction to the chilly breeze blowing around them. Tony doesn’t know how he knows, but it’s evident to him.

This has been his body’s last act of defiance. Resisting, clinging to life, holding on. And now that it has persevered and achieved a final, stubborn feat of endurance, it feels content to let go. After all this time, this is what gets him. Not Afghanistan, not the many people in whose way he stood, not the heartbreak, not the snap. This.

When he lifts his head from his chest with a strain, Steve has him laid out over his lap, an arm on his back holding up his upper body while another hand rubs up and down his arm that looks disturbingly delicate underneath Steve’s palm. Tony hears the shouts and the frantic voices; someone’s turning the compound upside down in search of a medic right now, but he knows it won’t be long. He can feel it in his flesh, as macabre as the thought is, the long, bony fingers of death elongating themselves in their reach for him, not quite there but close enough to be tangible.

Steve must see something in his eyes other than apathy, because his grip tightens immediately as if he could hinder death from taking him by sheer willpower. And in a way, Tony has seen him do it before: he's come back from injuries no regular human being ever would. But Tony isn’t a super-soldier, and he’s tired. Not even Steve Rogers can break the circle of life, try though he might.

With a frantic kind of energy that borders on the edge of desperation, Steve’s hand comes up and cups his cheek, stroking the all-too prominent bone there with gentle brushes that have nothing in common with the undiluted panic his bobbing throat and widening eyes communicate. He’s trying, for Tony, to hold back. Appear calm, provide comfort. Too bad Tony can read him like an open book. 

“It’s okay,” he croaks out, and Steve startles, breath stuttering off into nothingness as if he believed Tony had forgotten how to produce words the same way his legs had forgotten how to carry his weight.

Tony looks at him and for a moment, the regret feels overwhelming. Because he won’t ever get to see a blue sky again and won’t ever walk beneath it with his hand in Steve’s – but he still refuses to shy away from that blue, blue gaze until he's spoken the words that he needs to say. 

“I figured it out. Nebula will tell you. It’s about _time_. The solution. Strange said I needed to find the way, and I did my part. But you–” The itch in his throat gets too intense. Tony coughs violently to relieve it, and Steve’s eyes turn dark and mournful as if Tony were already dead. “You need to do your part, Steve. Promise me. Promise me you won’t walk out on me, not on this. Please. I need this. Steve?”

A single tear rolls down Steve's cheek at the last word, the quietly raging oceans of blue spilling in the face of Tony’s plea and the despair in it. He nods frantically and more droplets create invisible trails down his skin, the ocean sloshing with the movement. 

Tony is loathe to see him this distraught, even after their falling out. Siberia should’ve driven the point home that the man's feelings didn't run as deep as Tony needed them to – and yet here Steve is, crying for him, proving him wrong. Tony joins, although the tears aren’t for himself but rather ones of joy as he understands Steve cares more than he ever believed possible, and ones of sorrow as the realization hits him that it won’t matter either way. 

They could’ve been good. Together. Tony wheezes out a breath that might’ve been a sob if he had the energy for it. He fears every single one to be his last. They had the potential to be something great but were somehow destined to fail, pawns in this cruel game the universe plays. Some things would always be too good to be true.

With effort, Tony turns and presses his face into Steve’s shirt, inhaling the faint scent one last time. This night is full of last times.

He can’t even muster to feel regret or wistfulness, doesn’t want to go out with either emotion. Everything he wants is this, to be enveloped by the man that was by all accounts the love of his life – how very Tony of him to admit to that on his deathbed – enveloped by him in body, smell and voice. 

Steve brushes a greasy strand of hair off his forehead, and his smile is weak and watery, barely holding on. “I love you,” he says, and although every line of his body that is hunched over Tony’s speaks of grief, his voice is firm and clear. There is no doubting that message, and Tony doesn’t think to even for a moment.

“I love you too,” Tony whispers, quiet but just as sure in return. The words almost get punched out of him. “Always have–”

“–always will,” Steve finishes for him, lips twitching up and down as the pretend smile clings to the corners of his mouth with all its might but is overshadowed by the force of his breaking heart. 

Always is a long time for someone like Steve. 

So, what Tony says, finally, to give both of them some peace of mind before he goes, is something that Steve often forgets and needs to be reminded of. And now, too, it’s of importance – because Tony needs to know, even if Steve grieves for a long time, that he won’t clutch onto the emotion forever, until it has long expired and has no right to exist any longer.

Tony’s hand almost refuses to move, but he brings it up to touch Steve’s that is still cupping his cheek.

“Give yourself time, Steve.”

His hand slips off the other man’s a weakened heartbeat later, and his breathing evens out not long after. There is a wail of agony that tears through the quiet of the night, slicing through the air with despair that is sharp like a knife and fury that rolls like thunder. 

Tony can't alleviate either emotion. The inability leaves him hurting. It's out of his hands, now. 

There is no time. 

Tony allows the dark n e s s t

o 

t

a

k

e h

. 

. 

. 

**Author's Note:**

> drop me a line if you ahem. enjoyed :)


End file.
